


Vacuum (calm before the storm)

by ArgentNoelle



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Internal Conflict, Mental Anguish, Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-04
Updated: 2013-12-04
Packaged: 2018-01-03 10:42:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentNoelle/pseuds/ArgentNoelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last sight Thor had of Loki was of him standing very still, hands clasped and draped by thin silver chains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vacuum (calm before the storm)

**Author's Note:**

> Thor 2 inspired, but no spoilers

The last sight Thor had of Loki was of him standing very still, hands clasped and draped by thin silver chains. The way the guards converged around him, swallowing him from sight; and then there was only the oppressive heat of summer, and the dark shadows of the palace. His part was over. Thor turned aside, feeling suddenly adrift. The events of the last few days had come like a sudden tide—only hours ago he had been fighting for his life against creatures from outside the Realms, fighting with a team of Earth’s warriors, people he now considered comrades. And here he stood now, amid the still hot day, long shadows stretching black and hard from every pillar. He did not know what to do. For the past year, he had been in mourning—he could be no longer, for Loki had been found, alive if not well. But that part had ended, he told himself once more; there would be no more of Loki’s tricks and madness. (No more of Loki.) He had to do something, had to move. He was walking without knowing where his feet took him; he came at last to the sparring grounds and threw himself into physical exertion. The sun moved lower and shone golden before it slipped over the edge of the world.

Night, then: and he lay in his bed, while the still breeze only moved the humid air, and did not cool it. For once the scenes did not play as they had been wont to in the darkness: Loki’s face becoming calm and blank, and the way his fingers slipped agonizingly slowly from their hold on the staff. (If only Thor had been quick enough to grab his hand, he would never have let him fall)—no, this time it was replaced with new images. A face gaunt and feverish, a body like a coiled whip, stalking in the darkness. The way his eyes betrayed him (or was it only another trick? He had told himself he would not be fooled again) the feel of a dagger, sharp and hot, in his side, and slick warm blood against his fingers as it fell to the ground.

Not a fatal wound. That should mean something—he knew not what, and it filled only the spaces in the grey skyline, punctuated by yellow flames.

Perhaps he had been wrong after all. The tight grasping confusion, insistence that there was some reason for his brother’s behaviours, that he was not truly evil… how could one day negate a whole thousand years of life?

Or had that, too, been a lie? A great twisted game, mischief on a larger scale. They all knew how Loki’s tongue could cut bleeding swathes of dark truths, his hands snare ropes and nets of slippery grey falsehoods. He could not say how deep the madness ran—could not say if, perhaps, it came on him suddenly, or if it had been festering within him, eating from the heart out, blackening beneath the skin until he was nothing more than a shell.

(But to think that way led to his own madness, he could not accept such a thing—rather, it was his own fault that he did not see)

The sounds that came from his throat were too long outward, too short inward, spending so much time on each and every breath he had forgotten how to breathe. Behind his eyelids the dark shapes of the room dissolved, but taking their place was the nightmarish forms of great creatures, the thin teetering edge of a cliff too high to see the bottom. He must not think. He must not think of that.

(It was supposed to have been fixed. Loki was alive, he would face due punishment, and order would be restored. Wouldn’t it?)

But that was not what plagued him. He did not know his own mind. He wondered when that had changed. Perhaps he never had, but had never realized. Perhaps he too was going mad.


End file.
